U.S. Olympic Hockey

Patrick Kane has a sadOh my God, what an ass-kicking. Canada put on a clinic for America and then Finland did the same, with even more success.

Patrick Kane never showed up—he missed again and again and took horrible penalties. His face after his second penalty sums things up nicely for the U.S. (see left).

And the US didn’t even both covering the greatest Olympic goal-scorer ever, warming the hearts of 40+ year-old guys everywhere by letting Teemu score not once, but twice.

Continental... [More]

Surprised cowWhen you grew up in the countryside, you tend to have to prove the extreme rurality of your origin to others who share a similarly bucolic provenance. Should I become embroiled in future such contests of micturial prowess and find myself in trouble, struggling to triumph against a backwoods foe prodigiously well-equipped with a backwoods background that threatens to overshadow my own, I will rest assured that I can break the glass in case of such an emergency to retrieve the following link to... [More]

I’ve been using CSS since pretty much its inception. It’s powerful but quite low-level and lacks support for DRY. So, I switched to generating CSS with LESS a while back. This has gone quite well and I’ve been pretty happy with it.

Recently, I was converting some older, theme stylesheets for earthli. A theme stylesheet provides no structural CSS, mostly setting text, background and border colors to let users choose the basic color set. This is a perfect candidate for LESS.

So I constructed a... [More]

The following article was originally published on the Encodo blogs and is cross-published here.

If you’re only interesting in what we promised to show you in the title of the article, then you can jump to the tl;dr at the end.

Silver Partnership

Encodo is a member of the Microsoft Partner Program with a Silver Competency. We maintain this competency through a combination of the following:

• A yearly fee
• Registration of .NET products developed by Encodo (Punchclock and Quino in our case)... [More]

I shelled out CHF8.– for Zattoo for this month so that I can watch the Olympics on my own schedule. It’s pretty sweet, especially for hockey games.

USA/Czech Republic & Canada/Latvia

Zattoo keeps a 7-day buffer for over 100 channels. You can actually watch for free, but you don’t get HD and you have to watch extra, Zattoo-specific commercials. The Olympics coverage is remarkably commercial-free, at least on the Swiss (Swiss-German, German, French and Italian) and Austrian channels. The German channels have more... [More]

BelgiumBermudaLithuaniaGermanyRussiaSloveniaTongaFranceIrelandItalyLithuaniaUnited StatesUkraine

The blog post/article So You Want To Write Your Own Language? by Walter Bright (Dr. Dobbs) contains a lot of interesting information, related to only to parsing, but also to runtime and framework design. Bright is well-known as the designer of the D programming language, so he’s definitely worth a read.

I thought he jumped back and forth between topics a bit, so I summarized the contents for myself below:

Parsing

Bright identifies Minimizing keystrokes, easy parsing and minimizing the number of keywords as false gods.... [More]

What is it worth to wade into a discussion where you are asked to choose a side based on no clear rules of evidence?

I mostly enjoy Woody Allen movies. That he has been with Soon Yi, the adopted daughter of his ex-wife for years doesn’t really weigh on my opinions of his films. I must admit that knowing that Polanski raped a teen-aged girl and fled the country enters into it very little when I’m considering whether to watch one of his movies. Polanski clearly got away with it and wasn’t... [More]

Perhaps uncharacteristically, this post will consist mostly of citations of other articles about the nature of addiction. I have relatively little contact with addiction, but the truth of what these ex-users write is evident to anyone of a rational bent who is reasonably informed about the world.

The article Philip Seymour Hoffman is another victim of extremely stupid drug laws by Russell Brand (Guardian) writes,

“People are going to use drugs; no self-respecting drug addict is even remotely deterred by prohibition.”

... [More]

Text-formatting manual updated!

The manual for the earthli text formatter has been updated to include all of the latest tags and attributes. All of the non-trivial tags now have examples, including <pullquote>, <abstract>, footnotes (<fn> and <ft>), <clear>, <anchor> and <hr>.

There are a couple of new tags for showing messages, <info>, <warning> and <error>, examples of which are shown below.

The following article was originally published on the Encodo blogs and is cross-published here.

One of the most-used components of Quino is the ORM. An ORM is an Object-Relational Mapper, which accepts queries and returns data.

• Applications formulate queries in Quino using application metadata
• The ORM maps this query to the query language of the target database
• The ORM transforms the results returned by the database to objects (the classes for which were also generated from application... [More]

The Super Bowl takes place way too late on a school night for all but the most ardent fans on this side of the pond. This is not to say that there are no such fans over here. The Germans and British both had full coverage, with the British channel Film4 having gotten Terrel Davis and Mike Carlson to assist the Scottish announcer Colin Murray, who started off slowly but got steadily more hilarious as the game unfolded into a slaughter of Denver by Seattle. There were plenty of people willing to... [More]

A while back, I participated in an evaluation of languages that could replace JavaScript for our web front-end development language at Encodo. We took a look at two contenders: Dart and TypeScript. At the time, Dart was weaker for the following reasons:

• It had not yet been released
• It had little to no tool support
• Integration with existing JS libraries was somewhat laborious

Though TypeScript has its weaknesses (it has technically not yet hit a 1.0 release), we eventually decided to go in... [More]

I have never really examined Ruby in detail but it seems to be even more of a treasure-trove of ad-hoc features than PHP.

It takes full advantage of being evaluated at run-time to offer features that I haven’t seen in even other dynamic languages. Some of these features seem like they might be nice shortcuts but also seem like they would be difficult to optimize. Not only that, but they seem so obscure that they would likely will trip up even more seasoned users of the language.

At any rate,... [More]

I recently got a new laptop and ran into a few issues while setting it up for work. There’s a tl;dr at the end for the impatient.

Lenovo has finally spruced up their lineup of laptops with a series that features:

• An actually usable and large touchpad
• A decent and relatively sensibly laid-out keyboard
• Very long battery life (between 6-9 hours, depending on use)
• Low-power Haswell processor
• 14-inch full-HD (1920x1080)
• Dual graphics cards
• Relatively light at 2.1kg
• Relatively small/thin... [More]

Take a deep breath. Step back. Does that sound plausible? Is the mighty power of the atom, harnessed by decades-old technology, likely to be able to effect such mighty change?

Because the Pacific Ocean is huge. Like, really gigantic. It has 16 times as much surface area as the entire United States of America. Hell, there’s a Pacific Garbage Patch whose estimated size is about the surface area of the US of A and we can barely even tell it’s there.

The article True facts about Ocean Radiation... [More] by Kim Martini (Deep Sea News)

The panel from the World Economic Forum on Saturday ended at 16:45 GMT+1. SRF Info was streaming it live in Switzerland in English and I caught the tail end of one of the panels. The discussion included Schäuble from Germany, Christine LaGarde (president of the IMF) and the presidents of the banks of Japan, England (who seems to be American?) and India as well as the president of Blackrock (an investment company) and was moderated by Martin Wolf of the Financial Times.

They discussed the... [More]

1. The Thing (1982) — 8/10
2. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) — 8/10
3. To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995) — 4/10
4. Memories of Murder (2003) — 10/10
5. True Legend (2010) — 6/10
6. The Grey (2011) — 5/10
7. Jack Reacher (2012) — 8/10
8. Hotel Rwanda (2004) — 8/10
9. The Lookout (2007) — 8/10
10. Renaissance (2006) — 8/10
11. Dara Ó Briain Talks Funny – Live in London (2008) — 10/10
12. Despicable Me 2 (2013) — 7/10
13. Dara Ó Briain – Live at the Theatre Royal... [More]

There are things that make us mad in this world. There are various release mechanisms for this. A common—and very effective—one is to curse.

But sometimes the thing about which we need to curse is so terrible, so skull-fuc&$kingly bad that you have to invent new curses for it. And sometimes, you have to invent entirely new technologies and possible futures in order to envision a situation bad enough to engender the creation of a language that would include language severe enough to... [More]

The first rule of policing

The post Dallas Cops Fight For the First Rule of Policing by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) defines that rule as “make it home for dinner”. No matter what else is going on that day or how a given situation develops, the first rule is self-preservation. Everything else—including gunned-down innocents—can be handled later and usually papered over with the help of others, both on the force and on the bench.

This post discusses a shooting incident in Dallas, in which a 48-year–old officer was,... [More]

Cartoonist Ted Rall published the following cartoon at the end of 2013:

On Sec. 107(a) of the NDAA

The first couple of panels document the most recent transgressions that the Obama administration has made under the auspices of the NDAA—the National Defense Authorization Act. These include sweeping away constitutionally guaranteed rights in a manner breathtaking even for citizens who survived eight years of the Bush/Cheney administration.

The final panel shows a soldier wondering how this can be, while another... [More]

The following screenshot of the post What is an example of a “useless/worthless PhD” or its opposite? by Mathbosss (Reddit) presents a prime example of how the Internet actively works to consume your every waking moment.

Screenshot of a /r/math post

I found the conversation quite interesting and somewhat humorous and was sorely tempted to continue. Fortitude intervened.

I use TrueCrypt at work to encrypt/protect the volume where I store source code for various customers. It generally works pretty seamlessly and I don’t even notice that I’m working on an encrypted volume.

The other day, Windows started complaining in the Action Center that my drive needed checking because errors had been discovered. At first, I thought that it was referring to my system drive—which is not encrypted—and I rebooted Windows to let it do its thing.

Windows was back up and... [More]

Purely out of morbid curiosity, I visited Healthcare.gov to see what’s going on over there. I’d heard so much.

Here are some comments additional to those embedded in the screenshot:

Home page is decent, if a little careless

• It did not reject me because I’m browsing from a foreign country. +1
• It redirected me from www.healthcare.gov to healthcare.gov. Canonical name is the short one. +1
• It loaded quickly. +1
• It’s pretty light on graphics. +1
• There are way too many fonts and font sizes. –1
• Stop using small-caps for anything other... [More]

It matters quite a lot whether an act of destruction was deliberate.

If someone takes credit for such an act, the act is denounced and it is immediately decided that we must do everything in our power to prevent its repetition.

When the perpetrators are known but deny responsibility, we enter a gray zone, which can be whitewashed by clout and connections and money.

When planes are flown into towers, killing about 3000 people, it is terrorism. When chemicals are spilled on Bhopal, killing... [More]

This article originally appeared on earthli News and has been cross-posted here.

The article Smart TVs, smart fridges, smart washing machines? Disaster waiting to happen by Peter Bright (Ars Technica) discusses the potential downsides to having a smart home[1]: namely our inability to create smart software for our mediocre hardware. And once that software is written and spread throughout dozens of devices in your home, it will function poorly and quickly be taken over by hackers because “[h]ardware companies are generally bad... [More]”

ELI5 is the “Explain LIke I’m Five” forum at Reddit. I recently answered the question “How and why do computer programs crash?” and thought the answer might be worth cross-posting (even though the post itself never gained any traction).

What is a program?

Programs comprise a limited set of instructions that tell them what they should do when they encounter certain inputs under certain conditions.

Who writes programs?

People write computer programs. Therefore, programs only do what those... [More]